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Tag Archives: Agnosticism

Jefferson and the Bible

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Jefferson and the Bible

Tags

Agnosticism, American Founding, American History, American Revolution, Biography, Christianity, church, doubt, Faith, founding fathers, memoir, religion, Reminiscences of Distinguished Men, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson's Religion, Was Thomas Jefferson a Christian?, William Slaughter

Thomas Jefferson

“Mr. Jefferson was a public professor of his belief in the Christian religion. In all his most important early State papers… there are more or less pointed recognitions of God and Providence. In his two inaugural addresses as president of the United States, and in many of his annual messages, he makes the same recognitions… declares his belief in the efficacy of prayer, and the duty of ascriptions of praise of the Author of all mercies; and speaks of the Christian religion as professed in his country as a benign religion, evincing the favor of Heaven. Had his wishes been consulted, the symbol borne on our national seal would have contained our public profession of Christianity as a nation. There is nothing in his writings or in the history of his life to show that his public declarations were insincere, or thrown out for mere effect. On the contrary, his most confidential writings sustain his public professions, and advance beyond them into the avowal of a belief in a future state of rewards and punishments…

From his second Inaugural Message, December 15th, 1802: ‘When we assemble together, fellow citizens, to consider the state of our beloved country, our just attentions are first drawn to those pleasing circumstances which mark the goodness of that Being from whose favor they flow, and the large measure of thankfulness we owe for His bounty. Another year has come around and finds us still blessed with peace and friendship abroad; law, order, and religion, at home.’

From his third annual message, October 17th, 1803: ‘While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved, let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence, which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative counsels while placed under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.’

He contributed freely to the erection of Christian churches, gave money to Bible Societies and other religious objects, and was a liberal and regular contributor to the support of the clergy. Letters of his are extant which show him urging, with respectful delicacy, the acceptance of extra and unsolicited contributions on the pastor of his parish, on occasions of extra expense to the latter, such as the building of a house, the meeting of an ecclesiastical convention at Charlottesville, etc. He attended church with as much regularity as most of the members of the congregation — sometimes going alone on horseback, when his family remained at home. He generally attended the Episcopal Church, and when he did so, always carried his prayer book and joined in the responses and prayers of the congregation. He was baptized into the Episcopal Church in his infancy; he was married by one of its clergymen; his wife lived and died a member of it; his children were baptized into it, and when married were
married according to its rites; its burial services were read over those of them who preceded him to the grave, over his wife, and finally over himself. No person ever heard him utter a word of profanity, and those who met him most familiarly through periods of acquaintance that they never heard a word of impiety, or any scoff at extending from two or three to twenty or thirty years, declare religion from his lips. Among his numerous familiar acquaintances, we have not found one whose testimony is different, or who entertained any doubts of the strict justice, sincerity, truthfulness and exemplariness of his personal character.”

__________

Pulled from the Jefferson chapter of William Slaughter’s 1878 book Reminiscences of Distinguished Men.

I’m sorry for the recent hiatus. I’ve been really busy with real business.

In a letter to his eldest daughter, Jefferson cited his personal declaration of faith, which he made in the following letter to his friend, Benjamin Rush, on April 21st, 1803:

Dear Sir:

In some of the delightful conversations with you, in the evenings of 1798-99, and which served as an anodyne to the afflictions of the crisis through which our country was then laboring, the Christian religion was sometimes our topic; and I then promised you, that one day or other, I would give you my views of it. They are the result of a life of inquiry and reflection, and very different from that anti-Christian system imputed to me by those who know nothing of my opinions. To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus Himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others.

To this rather elastic, New Testament self-definition of Christian, it’s worth adding that Jefferson — who spent a good chunk of his retirement splicing his own, naturalistic version of the Gospels — was found to have hand-written the entirety of Psalm 15 on the inside cover of the prayer book mentioned by Slaughter.

As a small additional note: in 1776, at the Second Continental Congress, Jefferson was appointed along with Franklin and Adams to the committee to design a national seal. Adams suggested Hercules as the seal’s central figure. Franklin recommended Moses standing atop the Red Sea. Jefferson sided with Franklin, but also wanted it to include Pharaoh and Hengist and Horsa, the Germanic brothers who led the Anglo-Saxons in their fifth-century conquest of Britain.

Read on:

  • How Jefferson brought the parties together to fix the national debt
  • Jefferson’s advice to his teenage grandson
  • What evidence is there that Jefferson and Sally Hemings had a relationship?

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‘The Mystery of Suffering’: Robert Kennedy and the Meaning of Grief

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, Agnosticism, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, birth, Catholic, Catholicism, Charles Spalding, Christianity, Department of Justice, despair, Edith Hamilton, Euripides, existentialism, fate, God, Government, Greek philosophy, Greek tragedy, grief, history, Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, Nat Fein, Oedipus Tyrannus, Paul Mellon, President, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, Sophocles, The Greek Way, tragedy

Robert F. Kennedy Looking at John F. Kennedy Walk Away by Nat Fein

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy

__________

Again from Arthur Schlesinger’s great (if hagiographic) biography Robert Kennedy and His Times.

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

Aeschylus

Last Words for MLK

Or, read some additional wisdom from the Greeks:

Roman Face

From Homer’s Odyssey

Romans Statue

From the Discourses of Epictetus

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‘Tragedy without Reason?’: Robert Kennedy Endures His Brother’s Death

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Agnosticism, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Christianity, Department of Justice, despair, existentialism, fate, God, Government, grief, history, Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, President, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, tragedy

President Kennedy gallery

“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.

In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.

Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

He scrawled on a yellow sheet:

The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.

and

All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”

Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy at the Funeral for John F. Kennedy

__________

From chapter 26 (“Corridors of Grief”) of Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

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